On Sunday night, NASA will land its latest explorer on Mars, a stationary robot designed to explore the possibilities that life once existed on Mars—or still does—and perhaps lead the way for human colonization.
The Phoenix lander has a simple mission, but it's being conducted in a very challenging corner of the solar system. Once it lands, the stationary craft will deploy a 7.7-ft. robotic drilling arm that will dig through 20 in. of soil. The end of the arm has a scoop with blades for digging into the soil and a powered claw for breaking up frozen soil. If all goes well (and we'll have breaking coverage if it doesn't), the ice and soil will lifted up to Phoenix, where it can be analyzed for signs of life and chemical composition. The entire craft has been assembled to prevent contamination by earthly microbes—no one wants a false alarm concerning one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time.
NASA says the earliest possible time when mission controllers could get confirmation of Phoenix survived the landing will be at 7:53 p.m. EST. Keep your fingers crossed: Of 11 previous attempts by various nations land spacecraft on Mars, only five have succeeded. Phoenix will continually adjust its descent using radar pulses.
"The latest calculation from our navigation team shows the center of the area where we're currently headed lies less than 8 mi. from the center of our target area," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
For more background and second-by-second coverage of this weekend's Phoenix landing, follow NASA's coverage here. Stay tuned to PopularMechanics.com for analysis on what the mission means for a manned tripped to Mars; our correspondent will be watching history unfold with NASA scientists in the Arizona war room. —Joe Pappalardo